In general I'd suggest you stay away from the whole Analog->Digital
conversion thing. You could do digital only hardware effects (buy an SB Live
value and you've got the SPDIF I\O you'd need too). It's a fairly tricky
thing to do it right. Certainly I'd forget 24bit or 96kHz for a whole range
of reasons including:
1) Good luck ever getting 24\96. As an example, Creative don't make
especially good soundcards but they still have access to proper technology
(i.e. multilayer PCB's, proper Audio design engineer's (if not the best),
sophisticated EMI reduction software) and one of they're "16-bit" soundcards
can only achieve 13-bits dynamic range. Why cause it's REAL hard and REAL
expensive to design even a 16\48 soundcard let alone 24-96.

2) You're not leaving any DSP headroom. You always have more effects
headroom then master headroom. This is why 20\48kHz is a common format.
You'd never burn a 16\44.1 master to a CD, you always downsample first. So
that the effect that moves a 45kHz signal down to 38kHz has something to
work on. A 20\48 converter is prob. more manageable and well suited to CD
mastering. 24\96 is more for DAT (24\48). You'd need a REAL good ear to
notice the lack of >24kHz artifacts in a 48 compared to a 96 recording.

3) 24\96 converters alone can easily cost in excess of US$100+. Then you
need to ensure other components like amp will also meet the required specs =
more money.

If you want to investigate musical effects as people suggested, buy either
an eval kit if you're real set on hardware, or more sensibly use a PC with a
soundcard. Get CSound for a programming style view of it or
Reaktor\Audiomulch for a graphical view of it. Or as suggested write your
own. Easier to master DSP on a 500+MHz system with Floating point ops and
abundent resources then master efficient DSP later.

If you want high quality audio I\O from your PC and really want to make it
yourself, a USB based digital I\O unit might be more managable. Then all you
need is a fast-ish UART (a scenix could probably handle 1 I\O) and a SPDIF
transciever and reciever.

BTW: The SB Live is quite a good choice for experimentation. It has the same
DSP chip as the Emu APS and the value version probably less than many DSP
eval kits. There is info at http://come.to/sblive on writing DSP microcode
for it. Unfortunately most support is Linux based as there are Open source
drivers for Linux.

Tom.

-----Original Message-----
From: WytRaven [mailto:wytraven@KIK.NET]
Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2000 6:35 PM
To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: [PIC]: Muso's of the world unite! ;)


Hi guys,

I am a muso and my primary interest in subscribing to this list is to glean
information about using PIC's in music related experiments.  I am an
enthusiast not an engineer and would like to apologize in advance for
asking stupid questions occasionally.
After noting the interest that the MIDI keyboard question has raised I
would like to request that those of you out there who are musicians post
some info on the viable use of PIC's in music.  Personally I would like to
know if the PIC in any of it's many forms is suitable for sampling and
processing 24Bit/96KHz Audio.
Is it possible to use twin 12Bit ADC's to sample a signal, one sampling the
+ve part and one the -ve part?
After zero response to my first post asking about audio sampling with PIC's
I did some research...yes, OK, so I should have done that first...From what
I could find, there is no single PIC that can handle this kind of through
put but there's nothing stopping me from using 2 or three is there?

WytRaven

http://wytraven.8k.com/

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